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adventures in mobile paging

In the last years, mobile security and specifically GSM has been attacked in many different ways. It was demonstrated how to sniff and crack traffic, how to impersonate a subscriber by placing a fake call and the general security characteristics of this mobile protocol stack have been evaluated.

In this presentation, we will check out a part of the protocol procedures that hasn't been looked at yet, specifically Mobile Terminated services.

This talk is all about paging in GSM. How is a phone call or an SMS actually delivered to a phone? How do carriers locate your phone and transmit these services over the air?
We will have a look at the related protocol procedures and more importantly, what could possibly go wrong. During the presentation, we will show new attacks based on mobile paging that can ultimately disrupt mobile telecommunication or even worse.